Fortunately, because human eardrums were not designed to deal with such decibels and cacophony, it didn't last too long.

Evolution neglected, for some reason, to armor the human eardrum against the sudden change in air pressure that comes with a fall of hundreds of feet at a high speed.

The album is an early, well-known example of commercial studio noise music that the music critic Lester Bangs has sarcastically called the "greatest album ever made in the history of the human eardrum".

It isn't just because it has a range of more than 50 light-years: this little technological miracle uses the human eardrum as its microphone.

Fumes from hydraulic fluid stung our eyes, and the noise threatened to blow out human eardrums.

The sirens had an unpleasantly high tone to them which was painful to human eardrums.

Bangs later wrote a tongue-in-cheek article on Metal Machine Music titled "The Greatest Album Ever Made", in which he judged it "the greatest record ever made in the history of the human eardrum."

My God, it must be biological, maybe membranes vibrated by chemical signal..." "The human eardrum is biological," George said.

However, there are sources in outer space that do vibrate at frequencies that would be audible by a human, if only there were some sort of transmitting media to carry those vibrations from the source to a human eardrum.

The high polymer film diaphragm with its conductive coating is a mere 2 microns thick, less than one-hundredth of the thickness of the human eardrum.